It's not just the spelling, it's the hand writing.  Hey, I took penmanship at Catholic school decades ago, but there must be an awful lot of different scripts used in different decades and geographic areas.  How do I figure those out?

 The TV show "Who Do You Think You Are" had a piece with an historian talking with the guest star of the epiosde, who was a black American.  The man's name had changed spellings as he went back in time, but it started with "Beau", which generally has French roots and can be easily misspelled or misheard.  The historian went out of his way to say that census-takers were racially motivated to deliberately misspell black names.  This remark caused a large outcry on some other websites, since many of us have encountered misspellings.  Census-takers do not have to meet extraordinary linguistic standards to get that job, and as we go back in time, many more people who answered the door could not read or write.  Many may not have had English as their first language, and they may have lived where a different alphabet was used.  All those factors point to easy spelling mistakes.

Need help finding a relative. He lives/lived in the US. All I know is that he used to work for Grolier in the 1970s as a narrator. He was one of the people who narrated something called "Programmed English" published in 1978. Please do not search the Internet. I did that already. You must have actual knowledge or have access to info not available to just anybody. We do not share the same last name.

Thank you